Telecom Operators must find a way to stop being held hostage by their legacy BSS systems and processes. To find an escape plan, we need to understand how we got to this point and what must be done to move forward to the future.
Business Support Systems (BSS) are at the heart of a telecom operator’s successful business operations. But in the past two decades, operators have drifted away from a focus on their business by taking an IT-centric approach to source, run, and evolve their mission-critical business platforms.
What should be simple has become complicated, slow, and expensive. This has led to an unhealthy model of continuous change request (CR) spends, missed project deadlines, budget overruns, delayed time to market, and vendor lock-in.
The industry needs a paradigm shift in their approach to BSS solutions enabling them to quickly adapt to market needs by adopting agile business operations (BizOps).
So it's encouraging to see Telecommunications industry leaders now issuing a call to arms for open, agile telco systems and arguing that a major reset is required to put the focus back on their business to meet the needs of their customers and the market for the future.
For example, during his keynote address at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World 2020, Stéphane Richard, Chairman and CEO of Orange, said,
“Developing new digital services needs considerable IT agility, and to seize all the opportunities we need to change the way we do IT. The way we operate IT today, as telcos, is too complex, too rigid, and too cost intensive. ”
Richards continues, “Legacy processes and technologies are a systemic part of the problem. CSPs are just not transforming fast enough. Progress in addressing these challenges is so slow that some studies predict that by 2025 technical debt will consume more than 40 per cent of operators’ current IT budgets. We need to fundamentally rethink our operating model, our processes, our ways of collaboration and our ways of working.”
Qvantel has been a pioneer in the telecom industry for BSS software and successful digital transformations for over 20 years, and we are passionate about understanding the most critical pain points telco operators are having. It's been our mission to improve, innovate, and optimise our offerings to address not only the short term challenges, but also to create a viable new approach to BSS with a comprehensive, cloud-ready solution for modern, customer-centric digital business with data-driven intelligence and flexible monetization models.
We have recently created a whitepaper about how the industry has arrived at this point, and what are the key areas we need to address.
To learn more, click the link to download your free copy. (PDF)
